Amerinet announced Wednesday that it has a new name as it adds supply chain management and consulting to its group purchasing business.
Now known as Intalere, the St. Louis-based company has gone through a number of changes since being acquired by Intermountain Healthcare last June. It has reshaped its business plan and hired a number of new C-suite executives, including a new CEO. Todd Ebert left the group purchasing organization after the acquisition and now leads the Healthcare Supply Chain Association, the GPOs' lobbying group.
Intalere CEO Brent Johnson, a former Intermountain executive who joined the company last July, said the new name, which comes from a Latin word that means to nourish, signals the company's new vision. That is to create customized solutions to manage customers' entire nonlabor spend, using technology, products and services and its GPO. The GPO serves over 80,000 members, including 3,695 hospitals.
“We integrate,” Johnson said. “We help people nourish … we know supply chain and we're going to help (members) manage their entire nonlabor spend.”
As Johnson previously has told Modern Healthcare, Intalere will now offer value-added services beyond contracting, including consulting and outsourcing services that help hospitals manage their supply and pharmaceutical spending.
Intalere will also begin to chase larger health systems as it reshapes its business, Johnson said. Right now most of the GPO's hospital members use it as a supplement to their primary GPO, but that will soon change, he promised.
As a professional supply-chain organization, Intalere won't "grow up on the back of administrative fees” from vendors that traditional GPOs rely on, Johnson said. He emphasized, as he and other leaders have in previous interviews, that VHA-UHC Alliance's acquisition of MedAssets' GPO and consulting business has created a vacuum for provider-led organizations to present their model to traditional GPO members.
“Everyone is interested in looking at their GPOs in 2016, and it really creates a burning platform for us because they're already interested in listening to us anyway,” Johnson said.
